Archiving email with Outlook Express

[Headtime]

All my folders in OE are groaning at the seems with old emails, making the program very unstable. I don't want to delete them all en masse, so what's the best way of archiving them or exporting them to a different hard drive on my system and out of Outlook Express. Cheers.

[j2buttonsw]

The data files have the suffix: .dbx (such as inbox.dbx, sent.dbx etc) you could search for then back these up then start again. Why not use Outlook? It is miles better and you could export your OE files to a .pst file which you could then import to Outlook. In Outlook you could create a second "archive" .pst with old emails culled from your current .pst file. Plus you have the added calendar and contacts functionality.

[Headtime]

Ta, Mr buttons. If I make copies of all my *dbx files and then delete the originals, will new empty files be created by OE automatically next time I start it up? Or do I have to copy the dbx files and then manually delete all my email within the folders?

[j2buttonsw]

If you backup then delete the .dbx files, OE will create new ones. The problem will be viewing your old emails that you have backed up (which will be in your original inbox.dbx file). You will have to move the new inbox.dbx and replace it with the original inbox.dbx. Also, the location of these files make them hard to find (in Windows 2000/XP they are c:\documents and settings\%username%\local settings\application data\identities\{xxx}\microsoft\outlook express).

[anthomson]

Just select the mails you want to archive and drag & drop them to your destination folder. Each mail will be copied to the folder as a file with an .eml extension. If double-clicked they will open in Outlook Express as normal.